African Civilizations by Graham Connah
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every book’s a sourcebook: African Civilizations: Ballana
Friday, August 13th, 2010Mazes and Monsters retro-clone 4: love and character sheets
Monday, August 9th, 2010A strange plant is growing in Tom Hanks’ heart… and its name is love. In a story repeated at so many gaming tables, the tank (Kate) is falling in love with the healer (Hanks).
What's that at the end of the maze? It's a heart!
- Dragnet: A buddy movie; the other buddy gets the romantic subplot.
- Big: Child in an adult body.
- Turner & Hooch: A love story between a guy and a dog.
- A League of Their Own: A baseball coach has a team of female players and doesn’t have a romance with any of them.
- Sleepless in Seattle: A romantic comedy in which Hanks and the girl don’t actually spend any time in the same city.
- Philadelphia: Antonia Banderas is presumably Hanks’ boyfriend, but they act like roommates.
- Forrest Gump: OK, Forrest loves Jennay. So far, this is the only Hanks movie I’d put in the romantic class of Mazes and Monsters.
- Apollo 13: Hanks spends the movie 205,500 miles away from his wife.
- Saving Private Ryan: Hanks’ love for Private Ryan is never made explicit.
- You’ve Got Mail: I haven’t seen this but I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt: maybe, unlike in Sleepless in Seattle, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan actually meet and don’t JUST email each other.
- Cast Away: Love story between a man and a volleyball.
- The Polar Express: Love story between a Hanks and a Hanks.
- The Da Vinci Code: The idea of anyone loving a man with that hair is clearly preposterous. Besides, *SPOILERS REDACTED* Jesus Hanks.
All I’m saying is, it’s unusual for a Hollywood leading man to be so asexual. Hanks’ heart will forever be barren and inhospitable to love, as if he left the Mazes and Monsters set with +3 bracers vs. Cupid’s arrow. Why? Could it be that he never forgot Kate? or could it be that his Mazes and Monsters obsession left him warped – a child in a man’s body (an echo of which we can see in Big)? Remember, not everyone is able to play at the Ninth Level. Perhaps Hanks was not ready for the demands Jaffe put upon him.
But that’s all in the future. Here, today, at this gaming session, Tom Hanks’ heart is very much alive. We see a montage of his eyes locking with Kate’s over the gaming table… him ducking under her umbrella… them jogging together. Sexy stuff! But for our purposes, the most important scene is the two of them working on their character sheets together.. We get screenshots!
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Gen Con Design and Development seminar 2: design, minis, races
Friday, August 6th, 2010Adding more notes to go with yesterday’s seminar report (of which the highlights were: core books being republished, less feats in Essentials, skill challenges in Essentials)
1. There were some cool insights into the development process: in 2nd edition AD&D it was standard practice to give someone a major project and then not really hear much from them for 5-6 months, where as now the process usually involves a lot more people working together and looking over each others work.
2. Distinction between D&D designer and developer: This has probably been covered in other places, but the basic idea is that the designer is the one who basically writes the text and comes up with the story and rules. The developer is like an editor who goes over the rules and makes sure they fit with the current mechanics and are reasonably balanced. Then of course, the editor goes over the text and checks it for grammar and spelling and those sorts of things. And of course, as Rich Baker pointed out, the developer isn’t illiterate and the editors know the rules of the game so their jobs can overlap a bit.
3. Miniatures: Someone expressed concerns that D&D miniatures might stop being produced, but it sounds like WotC is just spacing out their release cycles on them a little bit to give retailers a chance to sell them. So, as should be evident with the recent release of Orcus and other stuff on the horizon, they won’t be going away any time soon.
4. Races won’t be as crazy common as they were in 3.5! Apparently in 3.5 there were something like 150+ playable races, which was kind of ridiculous! It was an intentional design decision to scale that down to more manageable levels and focus more on filling cool fantasy concepts for races (and sometimes making space for new ones as it seems appropriate) rather than take up a lot more space in books with races people don’t really need, especially since a 4th edition race description is a lot more involved and needs more support than a 3.5 one.
Gen Con design and development seminar
Friday, August 6th, 2010(10am edit:added misc notes)
I went to the “Gen Con Design & Development: Presented by D&D Insider” talk, which was run by Rich Baker and Stephen Schubert (with Bill Slavicsek joining for the Q&A session). There were some answers about Essentials as well as other miscellaneous future-plans comments:
Facts about Essentials:
1. Bill Slavicsek confirms that Essentials will not be replacing the PHB 1. They will continue to print the core books as needed. (Slavicsek said the no-reprint rumors were untrue and seemed a little annoyed about the whole rumor.)
2. The monsters in Essentials will be iconic d&d monsters, like goblins, orcs, giants, and trolls, but they won’t be replacing current MM1 monsters, just adding new varieties of those monsters.
3. Essentials won’t have a slew of new feats, since there’s kind of a sense that D&D 4e already has a bit too many feats.
4. Some powers will be updated to make them slightly stronger/weaker with the essentials release. Example: Lightning Bolt will have a new keyword (evocation, which matters to essentials mages) and do half damage on a miss.
5. Essentials will also be helping codify skill challenges, expanding on work already done in the Dungeon Masters Guide 2.
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random fantasy book generator
Thursday, August 5th, 2010Recently I mentioned my criteria for fantasy books I wouldn’t read. I’ve expanded that into a random fantasy title generator:
Actually, some of these don’t look that bad. When paging through, for instance, I saw Kings of the Dead, which, I don’t know, I might take a look at.
If you see any title that you might actually pick up, leave it in the comments!
what not to read
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010Let me say this up front: I have pretty bad taste in fantasy novels. I say this because later on I’m probably going to say something bad about a book you like.
I really like sword-and-sorcery novels and sword-and-planet novels. Some S&S/S&P fiction is well-written; that is, however, not a requirement for me. I like pulp axesploitation Conan and Burroughs pastiches from the 60s and 70s. I will buy almost any book if its cover has a painting of a sweaty barbarian.
Extra points for each of the following:
- barbarian is being fondled by a woman wearing a gold bikini
- barbarian is astride a headless snakeman
- bracers or torques are in evidence
- barbarian is next to some braziers and/or thrones
- behind the barbarian: a planet surrounded by stars! Extra points for a rocket ship
- the barbarian has a super ugly face
Mazes and Monsters retro-clone 3: meet the characters
Monday, August 2nd, 2010After last week’s extremely informative introduction to the game system, we get a shot, from one of the players’ point of view, of a character sheet and a corner of the game board.
Unfortunately, it’s nearly impossible to read the character sheet. So much valuable rules information, lost, just because of lousy screen resolution! Squinting, I can sort of convince myself that the second word on the character sheet (after the character’s name?) is “strength”. The fourth word seems to end with “ing” (cunning?) and the fifth word looks like it ends with “ge” (courage?)
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Rory and Paul on D&D Essentials
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010Hey Rory! I heard the sky is falling!
Quick! Look outside!
Oh no! the sky is gone!
Paul, did you actually look out the window?
No, I just went to weather.com.
Mazes and Monsters retro-clone 2: actual gameplay
Monday, July 26th, 2010(As I mentioned in part I, I’m reverse engineering the rules to the RPG from the Tom Hanks blockbuster Rona Jaffe’s Mazes and Monsters.)
Here’s the first scene where we see a Mazes and Monsters game being played! And, as we’d expect in this film, which is so steeped in RPG rules that it is practically a Mazes and Monsters manual, we can get a lot of rules information from just the first frame of this scene.
First of all, we can see that this game is played on a board. (I think? It could also be just an awesome coffee table that happens to have a dungeon-like pattern.) Second, we see that there are candles. Lots and lots of candles. Finally, we see what looks like a GM’s screen, shaped like a sweet castle!
Notable for their absence: dice. None of the players have any dice sitting in front of them. What kind of game is this? What do the players stack when they are bored? The only possible answer is NOTHING, because IN MAZES AND MONSTERS YOU DO NOT GET BORED!!!
If anyone had any lingering doubts about Mazes and Monsters being an entirely separate game from D&D, those doubts should be dispelled. Most editions of D&D have some sentence that is a variation on the following: All you need to play this game is a few friends, this book, dice — and imagination!
Imagine that sentence as it would appear in the Mazes and Monsters rulebook:
All you need to play this game is at least three friends, this book, NO dice, a board (or possibly a coffee table), and some personal problems you want to work out. Hundreds of candles are optional but highly recommended.
OK, let’s get to some dialogue!
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Every Book’s a Sourcebook: Mossflower
Friday, July 23rd, 2010
Mossflower is a young adult fantasy about some mice on an adventure. The two main characters are routinely described as “the warrior” and “the thief”, so you don’t have to look far to find the D&D roots here.
An interesting difference between mice and human heroes is that mice don’t have the sense of entitlement that comes with being on the top of the food chain. Humans expect to be able to kill any monster, even dragons; but there are a lot of predators that mice, even mice warriors, flee.
At one point, the rodent heroes fight a crab. They’re forced to flee because the crab’s shell makes it impervious to their attacks.
Obviously, Mouse Guard is the appropriate system to model such a battle, but as a D&D battle, it could still make a memorable encounter. A fight with a creature with an unreasonably high AC could potentially be more like a puzzle than a traditional battle. How can the PCs triumph if they can’t hit? The AC would have to be very high, though: if it were just, say, 5 points higher than average, the PCs probably wouldn’t change their strategy. They’d just bang against the creature for turn after turn, missing on a die roll of 15 or lower, and blame the DM for a boring encounter.
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